If Not Silver, What? eBook

Of the many singular features in the present overheated
controversy, probably the most singular is the fact
that comparatively few bimetallists know of, or, at
any rate, say much about, this demonetization of gold,
while the monometallists ignore it entirely, and many
of them, who ought to know better, absolutely deny
it.

So extensive was this demonetization of gold, and
so far-reaching were its consequences, that it may
easily be believed that it was the beginning of all
our misfortunes, and that the crime of the century,
instead of being the demonetization of silver in 1873,
was really the demonetization of gold in 1857; for
that was the first general or preconcerted international
action to destroy the monetary functions of one of
the metals and throw the burden upon the other, and
it first familiarized the minds of financiers, and
especially of the creditor classes, with the fact that
the thing might easily be done and that it would work
enormously to their advantage.

It may also be said that it led logically to the action
of 1867, which was but the beginning of a general
demonetization of silver.

The history of gold demonetization is full of instruction
and is here given in detail.

In 1840-45 the world was hungering for gold.
All the leading nations had just passed through financial
convulsions which shook the very foundations of society.
Several American states had either repudiated their
debts outright or scaled them in ways that to the
English mind looked dishonest, and there was a general
uneasiness among the creditor classes of the world.
A universal fall of prices had produced the same results
with which we are now so painfully familiar.
In the half century terminating with 1840 the world
had produced but $529,942,000 in gold, coinage value,
and $1,364,697,000 in silver, or some forty ounces
of silver to one of gold; yet their ratio of values
had varied but little, and the variation was not increasing.
Why? Monometallists have raked the world in vain
for an answer. Bimetallists point to the only
one that is satisfactory, namely, the persistence
of France in treating both metals equally at her mints.
But there were grave apprehensions that France alone
could not maintain the parity, and so, as aforesaid,
all the world was hungry for gold.

And in all the world there was not one observer who
dreamed that this hunger would soon be far more than
satiated, and the philosopher who should have predicted
half of what was soon to come would have been jeered
at as a crazy optimist. In 1848 gold was discovered
in California, and three years later in Australia.
The supply from Africa and the sands of the Ural Mountains
had previously increased, so that in 1847-8 it was
equal to that of silver. But how trifling was
this increase to what followed. In 1849 there
was still a slight excess of silver production, and
in 1850 the proportion was but $44,450,000 of gold
to $39,000,000 in silver. Then gold production
went forward by great leaps and bounds. How much
was produced?